You’ve been to bars, but you really aren’t interested in choosing someone to date based 100% purely on looks. Well, fine, 98%. You don’t go to church; the church you go to has only old people, married people, or kids at it; or you’ve already dated someone at your church and, since all the people in your age group at your church are friends, you’re pretty much off limits to all of them now. You aren’t in school anymore, and you’re still annoyed that no one told you how much amazingly easier it is to meet people in school than in the real world.

Work is work.

You might have even tried online dating, but subsequently found that the human brain is incredibly sophisticated in its ability to integrate the innumerable subtle behavioral variables by which each person is uniquely distinguished from each other person, giving live face-to-face contact a tremendous advantage over online encounters when it comes to evaluating and selecting potential dates. Or, you know, maybe you tried and all you met were losers.

Whatever the reason, if you’re a single adult professional for whom all of the typical, cliche dating vectors have proven to be unfruitful, you need some new ideas. Just as often as I feel like it, I’m going to blog about another way to meet someone that is promised to be:

Awkward, and

Only marginally less obvious than the most obvious ways to meet people

Sorry, I don’t do things ado-free around here, and I definitely don’t have original ideas. At ATISTG.com, every idea is stolen (seriously, it has been on my list for weeks though) and every story actually happened or your money back. Regardless, here we go with the first slightly awkward way to meet someone interesting to date:

Way One: You Already Met A Totally Dreamy Person in College, But You Were Just Friends Then

Okay, this one’s cheating, and I’ll try my best to keep it un-mushy (too late?). But despite the fact that I’m going to restart at Way One for the gym thing, this way is definitely the number one way, like, in my heart. This is how I met the (literally) best girl ever.

I’m on dangerous ground here, because there is one thing that I am definitely not suggesting: if you are a guy, you can not go to a gym and stare at girls. They feel uglier than they normally would feel there and just generally don’t seem to like to be stared at. Plus, you are not as hot as you think you are at a gym, and you’re also a little more of an ass than normal, and not in the way that girls are alleged to like. It’s okay, this is biology, it’s just how it works, but it’s true. So I am definitely not saying you should find the hottest girl and go “help her with some weights” while you “show off your muscles.”

See, it’s true. Any girls that snuck into this paragraph are cringing. But, whatever, it serves them right. Get out of here, girls. You get your own paragraph.

A quick FYI for girls:

This is tangential, but it needs to be said: you are not uglier when you are sweaty at a gym. There is a biological reason for this too, but I don’t want to talk about it. It seems like the girls I talk to have never heard of this effect before. No, I’m not telling you why this is true, but it’s a pretty good subconscious reason for guys to think you’re hot when you’re gross and sweaty.

Okay, fine. I’ll give you a hint. Look, just think about other times in their lives that a guy would see a girl be sweaty.

Advice for everyone

Here’s what you do instead of being an ass or feeling ugly: take a class. Now, guys, you might not want to be the one guy in the yoga class, although I recommend it if you have enough balls because, instead of being creepy, you’re going to be too busy thinking about how sore your sorry cookie-dough un-yoga-prepared male body is going to be to even think of imagining talking to girls. Here’s the secret about yoga: it kicks your ass.

This advice goes for girls too, though. There’s spinning and kickboxing and weight training and all kinds of other things. Find something that fits your fitness level and be friendly to the people in the class. Over time you will build acquaintance relationships with them. This will do two things: (1) you will meet people who care about being in shape, and (2) you will have lots more motivation to be in shape yourself. Will you date them? Probably not. But this game is about meeting lots of the right kind of people. There is statistics involved. Any time you can branch out into a completely new peer group, you are giving yourself the chance to meet people to date.

Have I tried this before? Yes, kind of. I developed a delayed-action retro-crush about two years ago on a friend from high school who worked at a gym (delayed-action retro-crush = being attracted to someone who used to be attracted to you, because, say, they started working at a gym and got scary hot). I worked out 5 times a week and got into the best shape of my life. I think I never talked to her the whole time, except to say hi. But, whatever. I took some spinning classes and, you know, met lots of married suburban women with kids.